Meanwhile the lady in question had written to her elder brother complaining of her treatment at Court. The Hastings family were rabid Tories, and hated Lord Melbourne (who had often said publicly that there wasn’t an ounce of sense between them all), so now the fat was in the fire. Meanwhile Conroy took the story to the Opposition press, and urged them to make good use of it; and he persuaded Mamma to urge Lady Flora to demand compensation for her trials. So it all blew up again, with accusation and counter-accusation, rhodomontades from the Tory Press against Lord M. and Lehzen (whom they conceived to be the prime mover), Lord Hastings plunging about London like a fire-breathing dragon and threatening to call Lord M. out, and Lady Flora’s brother in Brussels busily spreading the story as lavishly as he could around the courts of Europe. The longer it went on the more I hated Lady Flora, and the more I hated her the more convinced I was that she was with child. I have to say the only person to come well out of the business was Mamma, who loyally stood by her lady-in-waiting through everything, and maintained from first to last that she was innocent.
At last the good Duke of Wellington, alarmed for the reputation of the Crown, restored an element of calm by persuading the three of us at least to appear in public together, which we did, though I must say it almost killed me to be civil to them. The Duke only managed to persuade me at all by assuring me that he knew who the real villain of the piece was, and that he intended to persuade Conroy to quit Mamma’s service. The idea was like a promise of Heaven to me.
‘But he will never manage it,’ Lord M. said sadly when I told him what Wellington had said. ‘Conroy will never obey the Duke, and the Duchess will obey no-one but Conroy.’ I feared he was right; but somehow the Duke did the trick. He would never tell anyone what he had said to Conroy to persuade him – ‘Plenty of butter,’ was all he told Lord M. – but years afterwards Mamma told me that the Duke had come to see her, too. He talked to her ‘pretty roundly’ about Conroy, saying that if the Queen disapproved of him, she needed no other reason to dismiss him. Mamma cried and trembled, for there was nothing more awful than the Duke in spate; and though she did not promise to dismiss Conroy, the weakening of her resolve to defend him may have been what finally persuaded him that the game was up.
Whatever it was, the fact of the matter was that on the 10th of June 1839 he dismissed his servants, and left with his family for Italy. It was the lifting of a weight from my shoulders. They stayed in Rome for a few years, and then came back to England to live in style in a large house near Reading. He never stopped corresponding with Mamma, nor pestering successive Prime Ministers for a peerage, but in 1850 the secrets of his appalling mismanagement of Mamma’s and Princess Sophia’s financial affairs were discovered, and if he had ever had any hope of preferment, it died then. Vast sums of money had ‘disappeared’ under his stewardship, including a draft for £16,000 from Uncle Leopold to Mamma which was simply never paid into her bank; and when Princess Sophia died, she was found to possess nothing but her household goods, though she should have been a wealthy woman. It was thought in the end that he had stolen some £60,000 of Mamma’s money and £400,000 of Princess Sophia’s, quite apart from the day-to-day spending of their incomes which he had benefited from. He died suddenly from a heart attack in 1854, and I would have been glad to witness his arrival at the Throne of Judgement and hear what he had to say in his own defence. I doubt it could have been much.
But back to 1839: Lady Flora had been growing more and more ill, while Lord M. and I discussed the wickedness of ‘that nasty woman’ and her ‘wretched family’ who were making such a fuss in the newspapers about her. Mamma’s championing of her I saw as a treason against me, and I complained bitterly to Lord M. of her harbouring my enemy. ‘I begin to dislike Ma amazingly,’ I told him, and he nodded gravely. ‘It is not to be wondered. Your Majesty is served very ill by them both.’ Then a few days after Conroy’s departure I received a stark message from Mamma that Lady Flora was mortally ill, and could not last the week.
I was shocked, and yet still a part of me resisted the inevitable conclusion, that I had been wrong about her. There was a stone lodged in my heart that would not yield to reason or experience; but I knew what I must do, in all decency, and I cancelled the ball which should have been held that night, and sent word that I would go and see Lady Flora whenever she liked. The summons came the next day. I went alone to her chamber, and what I saw there shocked me so profoundly that it was like a douche of icy water. A sickly smell hung on the air, sour and pungent, which was not masked by the roses in a bowl near her head – white and yellow roses, their petals beginning to be limp. She was stretched out on a couch looking as thin as anyone could be who was still alive, the flesh wasted from her bones so that she seemed literally a skeleton; yet her stomach was very much swollen, like a person who was with child. Oh, but her face, her face! Yellow, it was, the skin drawn tight and shiny over the bones, the orbits of the eyes so marked, like the empty pits of a death’s-head. She had no eyebrows or eyelashes, for all her hair had fallen out, and there was a horrid emptiness to the cap tied over her head, where the springiness of her locks ought to have been.
I spoke to her – I don’t know what I said – and she answered. Her voice was much as usual, and there was a good deal of strength in her hand as she took mine. I made myself hold it, though I wanted to cast it away from me in disgust, for it was nothing but bones, like a handful of bare twigs – a horrible, unnatural feeling. Her eyes scanned my face searchingly.
‘How – how are you, Lady Flora?’ I said weakly. ‘I hope you have everything you want.’
‘Thank you, I am very comfortable,’ she said. There was a silence. I longed to go, and could feel damp patches of fear growing in my armpits. Then she said, ‘I am very grateful to Your Majesty for all you have done. It is most kind of you to have come to see me. I am glad, indeed, to see you looking so well.’
‘I am – I shall – I do hope to see you again, when you are better,’ I stammered; and she only looked at me, and pressed my hand a little, and then turned her head away wearily, as if to say, ‘I shall not see you again.’ I could bear it no longer. I muttered something by way of farewell, released myself, and ran all the way up the stairs to my own apartments again, trembling with fear and disgust like a horse that smells lightning.
I had seen Death in there, I had smelled it. It had come into my own palace, forced itself upon my notice in the most violent way, when I had been thinking of quite other things. I am always here, even when you cannot see me. I will seek you out, I will have you; there is nowhere to hide, nowhere safe from me. Cover me with fine cloth, cover me with roses, it makes no difference. I am the great determiner, and I have already written your end.
And worst of all, I had wronged her. To fear and disgust were added guilt and self-loathing, and all I could do was to face it out defiantly and admit no fault. A few mornings later Lehzen woke me with the news that Lady Flora had died in the night ‘without a struggle, poor thing. She only just raised her hands a little and gave one gasp.’ I received the news stonily. I said again and again in the days that followed that I felt no remorse about her death. I had done nothing to kill her. It was none of it my doing. She had behaved abominably to me when she had me in her power, while I had graciously gone to visit her when she lay on her deathbed. Anybody would have thought she was with child, seeing the shape of her. It was not I who had started the gossip; it was not I who had stirred up the newspapers. Why should I feel any remorse? And so my arguments revolved in my thoughts. Outwardly I was cold and stubborn; inwardly I raged with hatred against Mamma, Lady Flora, the Hastings, and all who sided with them; and underneath it all, I whimpered with fear and guilt, and my nights were hideous with frightful nightmares.
Two days before her death, Lady Flora had made her family promise they would order a post-mortem examination to prove her innocence. This was carried out by Sir Benjamin Brodie and four colleagues, and they concluded unanimously that Lady Flora had died
of a tumour on the liver, which was grossly enlarged, causing a displacement of the other organs giving the appearance of pregnancy. The uterus and its appendages, they said, presented the usual appearances of the healthy virgin state.
I was very glad that custom forbade ladies to attend funerals. I sent a carriage, as did Mamma and Queen Adelaide; though the press had been so hostile to me since Lady Flora’s death that Lord M. feared mine might be stoned. A force of police was laid on to line the route to St Katharine’s Wharf (she was to be buried in Scotland) in case of trouble, but there was none, only a sullen silence and a few mutters. The muttering went on in the press, too, kept alive by the Hastings family (I sent Lady Flora’s maid £50, but old Lady H. sent it back), and of course the Morning Post’s deep desire to see off the Whig government. It was a great pity, Lord M. said later, that Lady Flora had died in July, for there was nothing much for the newspapers to think about through the summer months, with Parliament in recess and the ton out of town. They would forget all about it in September, he assured me; and counselled me to foster the detachment that shrugs off calumny and flattery alike.
But I felt low and wretched, and everything in life seemed to have lost its savour. I did not even care about riding any longer. ‘Tired of riding?’ Lord M. said in astonishment. But he felt guilty too. ‘I could have averted the worst of the scandal. Why did I not tell Lord Hastings that it was I who had spread the rumours? I should have told him I was responsible for it all – as, indeed, I was.’
‘Oh no!’ I said, very much touched.
‘Yes,’ he said, his eyes filling with tears, ‘for I am your adviser, and I have not advised you well in this matter.’
My eyes filled too. ‘You are the kindest and best of friends—’ I could speak no more. I took his hand and pressed it, and we sat in silence for a while, like castaways on a rock, alone in the middle of the world’s greatest metropolis.
2nd May 1900
ONE OF the reasons for the coolness which had sprung up between Uncle Leopold and me was that since I had become Queen I had rather gone off the idea of marrying. It was a long time since I had understood that Uncle and Grandmamma Coburg had planned almost from our births that I should one day marry my cousin Albert; but it was entirely an unspoken understanding. I had seen him only once, in 1836 when we were both seventeen, and he had come to visit us at Kensington with his father, the Duke of Coburg, and his elder brother Ernst. We had liked each other well enough, but at the time I was so wild for company and dissipation I should have liked anyone half as amiable. We certainly had not fallen in love, however. At that time Albert was much shorter than his brother, and rather fat, and he had not been in the best of health and spirits. He had suffered dreadfully from seasickness during the crossing, and had difficulty in shaking it off, and I was always impatient of ill health, being so robust myself. Moreover, I adored banquets and parties and dancing, and would have danced until dawn if the orchestra had gone on playing; while Albert had difficulty in staying awake after nine o’clock in the evening, found rich food indigestible, and preferred solitary reading to dancing or noisy parties. Nevertheless, he could be very amusing at breakfast-time, had a sweet voice, and a great talent for mimicry, which often made me laugh very much. When he went away I was quite willing to accept him as my future husband at some distant date, provided it remained distant.
The difficulty came when, after my accession, Uncle Leopold began pressing me to name that date. I had only just escaped from prison, and had given all my pent-up love to the man who had helped unlock my gaol. There were balls and parties and handsome young men vying for my hand at the dance. My lightest word was law, and, safe in the warm haven of Lord Melbourne’s constant attention, I had discovered the delights of flirting. The last thing I wanted was to harness myself to a dull, pudgy, sleepy-head cousin who went to bed at nine o’clock, who would doubtless object to every scheme of irrational pleasure I devised, and would be jealous of my admirers. Having so recently quit my cell, I was not eager to be locked up again, and so when Uncle Leopold enquired, I replied that I was too young to marry, and so was Albert: he needed more experience of the world – and his English was far from perfect. Uncle Leopold must have been alarmed to see his darling scheme slipping through his fingers. Though I did not know it, he had supervised Albert’s education specifically to fit him to be consort of England; and though I had not promised myself to Albert, Uncle Leopold had. When he relayed, as delicately as he could, my reservations to Albert, Albert expressed some of his own. He would not wait much longer for me to make up my mind, he told Uncle rather crossly. Suppose he held himself in suspense for three or four years, and then I decided against him – he would have wasted half his life. If there was to be no English marriage, he wanted the chance to settle his career in another direction, and choose a bride elsewhere before all the best princesses were snapped up.
In this unsatisfactory state things stood in 1839, in that miserable summer of Lady Flora. One day Lord M. and I sat very glumly together, sighing over my lot.
‘I am sadly changed since last year,’ I said. ‘I was so merry; I enjoyed everything so much, but this year the same pleasures seem like nothing.’
‘You will enjoy them when they come, when the Season starts,’ he assured me kindly. ‘It is the time of year. Everything is dull in July.’
‘And then there’s Mamma,’ I said. ‘I hate having her under my roof. Look how she retained a Certain Person, though she knew he was my enemy. And Lady Flora—’ I shivered even mentioning the name. ‘Everyone thinks I should make it up with Ma now, but I can’t forget how she sided with her straight away, instead of with me.’
‘It was very shocking,’ he murmured sympathetically.
‘But she never loved me,’ I added, working myself up to a pitch of self-pity. ‘She never cared the least bit about me. It’s hateful to think of all the years of torment ahead, having her living here. There will never be a moment’s peace or comfort.’
‘It’s very dreadful,’ Lord M. said, ‘but what can be done?’
‘I would give anything to have her go away.’
‘But that would be very shocking,’ he said. ‘You cannot live here alone.’
‘I know,’ I said gloomily, ‘and she swore years ago that she would never leave me while I was unmarried.’
‘Well then,’ he said, raising his eyes to mine, ‘there’s that way of settling it.’
I felt myself redden. ‘That is a shocking alternative,’ I said, and I got up and walked to the window to cool my cheeks. Marriage? I could not bear to think of it. I wanted to stay as I was for ever, safe with Lord M., and never have to grow up. I knew what marriage meant: it meant having babies, and the idea horrified me. And what one had to do to get the babies I did not know, but I could guess that that was shocking and horrible too, or why was it kept such a secret? And yet the alternative was to go on living with Mamma, which I hated. Besides, I knew that I could not really remain single. I was Queen of England, and my duty was to produce an Heir for the Throne.
Yet even to discuss the possibility of marriage seemed impossible: it was a subject of such delicacy that my maiden modesty retreated before it. I stood there in silence for a while, until I felt it was really too silly to be frightened of opening the subject with my kind friend. We had always been quite frank with each other. And after all, I only wanted to talk about it now, not do it.
I turned back to him. He had stood up, of course, when I did, but now I signalled to him to sit. It made me feel more comfortable to have him fixed in a chair while I moved about. ‘I don’t know whether you know,’ I began hesitantly, ‘that it is my uncle’s great wish – King Leopold, I mean –’ he nodded helpfully; I screwed up my courage – ‘that he has always wanted me to marry my cousin Albert; but I am not sure about it. I have only seen him once. He was not so very handsome, then, and he fell asleep a good deal.’
‘That is not a very appealing trait,’ he agreed carefully.
; ‘I cannot bear an arranged marriage. I love my country and I am ready to do whatever is for its good, but when it comes to a choice of husband, my own liking must be the principal thing.’
‘I think you have the right to expect that,’ he said comfortably. ‘No-one would wish you to marry where you had no liking. It does not conduce either to happiness or propriety for any person to marry without affection.’
‘I’m sure you’re right,’ I said eagerly.
‘But a little guidance can be to the good. Much must depend, I think, on what sort of person your cousin is.’
‘I hardly know. And I could not decide anything unless I saw him again,’ I said anxiously. ‘But I hear Albert’s praises on all sides.’
‘How would it be with the Duchess?’ he mused. He was trying, I see now, to gauge my feelings and accommodate his words to them; but I was so chronically in two minds on the subject he had not much hope of doing that! ‘If you were to marry him and then he sided with her against you, it would be dreadful. You would be worse off than before – it would make her so strong.’
‘Oh, there is no chance of that,’ I said, taken aback. I could not imagine anyone of my generation siding with Mamma. ‘You need have no fear on that score.’
‘Very well,’ he said, as though he doubted it, ‘but I wonder if you should marry a Coburg at all? They are not much liked here, ever since your uncle was awarded such a large pension. The quickest way to a person’s dislike is through his purse, you know! And they are unpopular abroad. The Russians in particular hate them.’
I, Victoria Page 18
